


From a Great Distance

by Truth



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Implied Incest, Multi, Murder, Non-Graphic Violence, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:32:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perspective isn't always comforting</p>
            </blockquote>





	From a Great Distance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dashakay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashakay/gifts).



"The dead appear to us in dreams, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…"

 Julian said that once, when waxing particularly poetic.  I remember it clearly because, at the time, it struck me as utterly ridiculous, no matter how beautiful.   I remember when our parents died, and much as we hoped and prayed they'd return or speak or send us some sign – they were gone.  We'd been abandoned, utterly.

Ridiculous, perhaps, but we were children.  Our parents were the center of our universe, and we orbited their sun like twin planets.  Without that caring and giving light, we had only each other and their ghosts.

Ghosts.  A lovely sentiment, as glorious and as empty as afternoon sunbeams.   The dead are dead, gone and sometimes forgotten.  They don’t care what we do or who we become once they've left us behind.  I held that belief firmly, bitterly, like a shield to keep me from further hurt.

Opposite, perhaps, to the view Julian always wished for us to have, but no one could ever have lived up to the beautiful, false images that he constructed for us to wear over our true faces; the stylized masks that we strove so hard to live up to.

The masks that brought ruin to us all.

While others might point to poor, dead Bunny or to Henry, troubled and misunderstood, as the author of our downfall, I think it came from somewhere deeper and more fundamental; from inside ourselves.

Julian gave us a world of beauty and clarity, a place where we were separate, elevated, held apart from the dreary mundane life that held the rest of the world so very close.  He chose us, and that alone gave him more power over us than you could possibly imagine.  Outsiders saw us as people who had everything, money or power or a family name – what they didn't realize was that we were lost, all of us.  Julian was able to see that need within each of us; for acceptance, for some goal to strive for, for a belief that we were more, or had the capability to become more, under his guidance.  That was why he chose us and why he isolated us.

It worked best, of course, on Henry.  So much brilliance, so little understanding of other people – he looked to Julian as _his_ sun, bringing light to the path before him and illuminating the hidden world that held so many beautiful secrets.  He took every theory and dream to Julian, who cultivated him with the gentle encouragement he'd never found elsewhere.  He grew and blossomed before our eyes, becoming more assertive and driven with every affirmation.  Henry turned from an eccentric with peculiar interests into a man who wished to meld mysticism and logic, science and pure belief.  More, his condition was contagious. 

Where Henry led, we followed. 

We did not follow blindly.  We questioned, sometimes heckled, occasionally revolted entirely – but he fascinated us, all of us, and we all wanted to be closer to him.  The easiest way to obtain that closeness was to scramble madly in his wake, determined to somehow catch hold of the fantastic visions that drew him onward.

Without that sense of false community, that cultivated leadership, we would have fallen apart far faster and with less drama.  More a schoolroom farce than a Greek tragedy.  I wonder sometimes if that is why Julian added Richard to the mix, so belated and against his earlier decision.  We were fracturing, and I'm certain Julian knew it, even if he pretended otherwise.  Richard was meant to bring balance to our tiny community, act as a buffer of sorts against the growing discord.  We had drama aplenty by then, but the tragedy was, perhaps, not yet inevitable.

We'll never know.  Had Richard been with us from the start, perhaps things might have been different.  Had we chosen to attempt his inclusion instead of hiding everything from him and thus increasing the tension and drama…?  But no, by then it was far too late.

Julian chose well, if tragedy had been his goal.  Alienated, isolated, friendless, orphaned, abandoned and alone – we were quite the group.  Without Julian, we would most likely never have sought each other's company, nor given such weight to ideas that, in our previous lives, would have been regarded askance if not rejected outright as insanity.  Julian had a certain presence and his expectations coaxed us on. Henry, however, had drive, and it eventually infected us all.

Only Bunny drifted through it all without care or regard for anything save himself, and perhaps that is what saved him from our fate.  After all, a tragedy is only truly a tragedy when exposed to an audience to evoke the proper reactions and Bunny was happiest when the absolute center of attention.  His tragedy was public.  Ours was private, and perhaps that's why it eats at us still.

Poor Bunny.  It's amazing that we could still think of him that way after everything that happened, but for all his bad habits, all that he did, he was one of us.  The bonds Julian forged in our tiny, artificial community were simply that strong.   Make no mistake, I hated Bunny for what he did.  The stings and digs, the casual insults, the calculated extortion; his torment of poor Francis, his exploitation of Henry, his humiliation of Richard but, more than all the rest, his destruction of Charles.

Still, through it all, he was one of us.  That connection and its betrayal was, perhaps incomprehensibly to outsiders, hardest on Charles.

Charles and I had been together since before our birth.  We always were together and, after the death of our parents, no one attempted to separate us.

"Those poor children, all they have is each other."

There was nothing to be pitied in our state.  We still had each other and somehow, even in the face of our tragedy, believed we always would.   We went to school together, we played together, we studied together, we ate together and slept together, sharing everything.

We did not always get along, but nothing disturbed our harmony for long.  Not until Julian accepted us into his class.  Not until we met Bunny. 

We were told that it was strange, our always being together.  Mixed twins were the exception, rather than the rule.  Twins often fought, demanding separation, their ego demanding recognition as 'I, me, mine'.  We knew we were not the same person, and no one ever treated us as such, perhaps because I was female, while Charles was male.  Still, we took comfort in each other's presence and any small squabbles were over almost as soon as they began.

This is rather a jumble, isn't it?  It's appropriate.  The entire business was disjointed, from beginning to end.  It started as the sort of silly, glorious mess that students do get swept up in, something to be told as a risqué story over drinks in later years to reminiscent chuckles; hazy, drunken recollections that draw a rosy veil over actual events and make even the act of vomiting on a strangers shoes something to laugh uproariously over.  Instead, it becomes a knotted mess of disjointed moments, improperly recalled and entirely out of order.  It's not something you want to think about terribly closely or remember very clearly, so it comes in bits and pieces.

I wonder sometimes what might have happened had Charles chosen to simply work at the bank while I went to school, or vice versa.  Where might we have ended up if we'd chosen a different school and still attended together?  What might have happened if I hadn't taken it into my head that we should study Greek? What might have become of us if Henry had not taken the idea into his head to attempt _Bakcheia_?  If Bunny had not been in the habit of stealing people's keys and never, ever knocking?

All the might-have-beens in the world swirled around me in those few, short weeks after Bunny's death.  If I'd grasped one or two of them, taken the opportunity granted me by that priceless gift of ten short days, perhaps the tragedy wouldn't have become personal.  Henry might still be alive and Charles –

We all lost so much that year, idealism, trust, each other and, at some level, ourselves.

Charles and I had a difficult time with separation.  As children, we fought to be together.  As we grew older, we began discovering the differences between us.  Each instance, slight though it was, would upset Charles.  He saw them as wedges driven between us, while I saw them as things that would balance the whole.  Often, he would come around to my point of view, realizing that divergent thoughts and interests would help fill in the gaps we each had, round us out more completely.  On some subjects, however, he remained resolute.

I think that is what caused his problems with Francis.

When I first discovered the attractions of men, rather earlier than Charles discovered the beauty of women, we made the acquaintance of jealousy together.  We'd never played terribly well with other children, reluctant to share our best and forever playmate with anyone.  I was far more reluctant to share Charles than he was to share me, at least at that stage, but neither of us were very welcoming of intruders into our tiny world of dreamy stories and play adventures.

Becoming a woman caused a shift in my perception, the thought that, perhaps, I could have _more_ than just Charles… and Charles did not see it as a widening of our tiny circle, but as an act preparatory to shattering it entirely. He resisted it with all his being, fought with grim resolve to be certain I understood how entirely destructive it would be to have to share each other with other people.

We were so young and so naïve, and he was desperate in his certainty that girls left their families, but boys stayed within them and that I _must_ stay with him, or he would lose me forever.  The hypocrisy inherent in this innocent statement did not become evident until, almost two years later, _he_ discovered girls. 

It was our somewhat erratic and intensely spiteful bickering over this very fact which resulted in our finding ourselves at Hampden College, exhorted by our grandparents to 'find yourselves' and to come home 'adults'.  If only they'd the slightest idea of what they'd sent us away to.

Surrounded by strangers, even if afforded the privacy of our own apartment, we were forced for the first time to allow acquaintances to become closer, to allow relationships that weren't brought about by blood.  Charles had a harder time with this newer, closer transition from 'people we knew' to 'people we spent time with' to 'people we spent time with alone'.  We were still together, but with a press of people outside our tiny bubble, and they would pop in and out unexpectedly, do and say things he wasn't prepared for and when he finally took the truly social plunge –

It was I who reacted badly.  I had always had an easier time with other people.  I liked watching them and speaking with them and finding out who they were.  It was enjoyable to construct stories in my head and play them out and see how closely they matched to the reality.  Charles always saw other people as intruders, and such an extreme shift in outlook brought equally extreme behaviors.

It was Bunny who taught us to drink, and I think therein lie a great many things which should best have been left buried.

"You're so _tense_ ," he'd declared, out of the blue.  We'd known him less than a day, and yet he'd managed to bull his way into our apartment and invite himself to a meal.  We'd learn soon enough that this was the least of his unpleasant habits when it came to self-invitation, but at the time we'd been too startled to muster rejection.  "Here, have some of this."

The flask he thrust at Charles turned out to be Henry's, and that led to embarrassment on another front, as he left it with us after 'borrowing' it without permission.  We did not discover this until much later, however, and Charles took it with a  doubtful sniff at the contents.

Detecting nothing noxious, he took a healthy swallow, only to immediately spit most of it back out, to uproarious laughter from Bunny.   "You're supposed to drink it, not bathe the room in it!  Try it again!"

Furious and embarrassed, Charles did so as I scrambled to mop up some of the mess.  You can imagine how the rest of the evening passed, I think.  I wisely refused the stuff, having seen its effect on Charles.  I'm still not certain what was in the flask, probably some rotgut mix of gin and other drinks that Bunny had randomly added whenever he'd nearly finished the last.  It made Charles vilely sick but Bunny treated him, for a short while, with respect.

So Charles discovered alcohol, and insisted that I try it as well.   We all drank more than was healthy, but it seemed to affect Charles more.  Bunny's accusation that he was tense had been entirely correct, though he'd been commenting on his discomfort at Bunny's invasion of our home, not the inner tension that Charles was so good at hiding.  Becoming mildly drunk did help him to relax… but eventually he no longer found satisfaction with that, and his drinking increased.

I don't blame Bunny for that, despite Bunny's actions being the cause of Charles' increased tension.  The fact that he looked for relief in the bottom of a bottle instead of some other, healthier way is Charles' fault alone.

Bunny's handling of the consequences of his own trespassing?  He could not have been ignorant of what his 'sly' comments were doing to my brother and I know he was deliberately attempting to hurt me. I, however, was made of somewhat sterner stuff than Charles – and Bunny been present on more than one occasion when we'd been out in the woods dressed in nothing but Francis' bed sheets.  A bacchanal is hardly a thing of restraint.  How could he find himself shocked?  Why would he try to punish us?

Why did Julian include Bunny?  Did he imagine that our group of scholars and oddities, for there is no doubt in my mind that he saw Charles and myself as such, required an athlete?  Not that Bunny was particularly athletic, but I can see Julian casting him that role.  Did he feel we lacked some form of spirit or virility that the inclusion of Bunny would bring?

Henry was entranced by the idea of understanding, of touching the unseen and the ancient, hallowed past.  Francis was seeking a different sort of understanding, but deeply interested in everything Julian's classes had to offer.  Charles and I were driven mostly by curiosity and a childhood fascination with a the tale of the Odyssey.   Richard was looking for a place to belong.  Bunny… I still have no idea why Bunny thought the Classics were a good match for him, despite years of attempting to appear highly intelligent by claiming a mostly specious childhood study of Greek.

Henry and Francis, Francis and Camilla, Charles and Francis, Henry and Charles; we fit together fairly well and we all _liked_ Bunny.   He could be boorish and offensive, he stole things and stuck you with check… but if you'd ever been exposed to his family, you somehow couldn't hold any of those things against him.  He was a product of his environment.  His family had raised him to believe that the world owed him everything, and he simply could not be brought to understand that it wasn't so.  He didn't mean anything by it and, until he turned on us, I would not have believed there was a malicious bone in his body.

Willful blindness, perhaps.  There was a lot of it about.

I truly enjoyed Francis.  For some reason, he and I always had a certain understanding, an ease between us.  He had so much to offer and had been taught by the world to keep it so strongly to himself.  I didn't expect any more of him than he was, and it always seemed to take him by surprise.   It didn't take long to realize that he had somehow found himself wrapped up in Charles.  It took Charles somewhat longer to figure this out, possibly because Francis' ease with me somehow did not extend to Charles, and his jealousy kept him from seeing what the cause of Francis' behavior really was.

I think drinking was the excuse. 

Charles knew that I knew.  I'm not certain Francis knew.  Neither would meet my eyes after a night when Charles had drunk just a little too much; nothing like his later, heavy drinking.  That it would happen on nights when I had been out with friends or meeting a young man was also not a coincidence – more of a cause.  I was never certain if it happened because Charles genuinely wanted to find a way to be closer to Francis than I was, or if he wanted to be closer _because_ I was.  It didn't matter that Francis and I weren't interested in each other in that way, or perhaps it was because Francis was the closest friend I had that wasn't Charles himself.

We'd stopped telling each other everything after a particularly bitter fight when we were sixteen.  I wish we'd never given up that habit.  I wish we'd fought harder to understand each other, instead of clinging to the illusion that we already knew it all; that we knew _best_.

It might have saved us.

Henry was a difficult person to know, but not hard to admire.  So much went on beneath the surface, so much thought and so much passion.  He was our leader, for all that outsiders often assumed it must be the vigorous Bunny.  It was he who took hold of Julian's mysticism and ideals, deciding that we must find the key to understanding.  It's difficult to describe the effect Henry had on those around him.  Henry had passion, for all he kept it tightly bottled, and seeing it come forth when he was absorbed in some idea or captured by a vision he wished to share – it is impossible to accurately convey.

That passion is what led us to destruction, because it was accompanied by a weakness that was equally strong and not simply crippling, but deadly.  Henry sought understanding with a blind, desperate drive that could accept nothing less than perfection.  I think the unfortunate death of that poor farmer disturbed him far less than the thought of prison because death was somehow pure and a part of the myth, a sacrifice on the altar of knowledge and understanding.  It was easier, then, to kill Bunny – to make another sacrifice – than face something so demeaning and vulgar as a trial and prison.  It would destroy the illusion that the farmer died for something pure and noble.

Easier to die while searching for truth and to touch the infinite and immortal than attempt to explain the sordid, ridiculous events that destroyed four lives.

Richard – perhaps it was his late inclusion that saved him.  If he had been with us that night, or even been aware, maybe he would have been dragged down with us, instead of keeping his head high and moving forward.  Bunny's death, after all, wasn't to protect _him_.  Richard was protecting _us_.  There was something oddly noble in that, and perhaps disturbing that I can look at premeditated murder in that light, even after all these years.  Henry swept us all away with his passion and his vision.

Everyone but Charles.

I think that Charles never recovered from that tragic, terrible night when we all reached past the thin veil of everyday reality and a man died.  He couldn't stomach Henry's acceptance of the death as a sacrifice, couldn't handle the memories, couldn't find anywhere to turn save the bottom of a bottle.  There was no solace there, and he would come home so drunk that he could barely stand, heart-broken, and beg me to make the nightmares stop.

It did not take long before his drunken sorrow turned to frustration and then rage. 

After the second incident, I would find other places to be when he came home.  This worked fairly well, until I came home after class to find him waiting for me, whether still drunk or drunk again, I do not know.

Henry arrived shortly after that and –

I loved them all, you know.  Charles, Francis, Henry and even Richard.  It wasn't the same sort of love or even degrees of love.  The Greeks had a lot to say about love, and I still don't think they had it quite right.

I was never more than fond of Bunny, and perhaps that's telling in its own way.

Henry's passion had a way of simply sweeping you away.  Dazed, betrayed and wounded, I allowed myself to be swept and I wonder, to this day, how things might have been different if I'd stood my ground.  I couldn't risk the police, but –

Might have been is almost as destructive as maybe.

The past is the past, and Bunny, Henry, Charles and Francis are lost.  You don't have to die to be destroyed, and Richard and I are left standing in the wreckage.  Richard will find something to strive for, I feel.  He was at the fringes of what destroyed the rest of us, and did not suffer the same guilt.  Guilt aplenty, but not of the _same_ immediacy and intensity. Richard was with us when Bunny died but, of us all, I think he is the only one I cannot call a murderer.

As for me… I miss Charles every day, not the person he became, but the person he once was.  I know that he will never forgive me, but I hope he's found peace.  I miss Francis, and feel his own tragedy no less acutely because he survived.  I miss Richard, even if I couldn't love him in the way he wanted.

I… do not miss Henry, and perhaps that's my own tragedy.

I still see him, sometimes.  Young and frowning, caught up in his passions and reaching out for someone to understand them. To understand _him_.

"You've got so much more to offer, Camilla.  You should travel more."

"You need to read this book.  You'll understand then."

"I'm not sorry, Camilla.  You need to live all of life, the sorrows and the joys, to appreciate them.  You're a stronger person, now.  Strongest of us all."

I don't know how much of what he says is true, but there's no real comfort in it.  Strong doesn't always mean happy, and I think I'll never forgive him for what happened in that hotel room.

What does that say about me, that two murders upset me less than that pair of gunshots?

Still, I'm not unhappy.  There is a light that only I can see, still improbably wearing glasses and always with a book in hand - and I am not alone.


End file.
